To be or not to be: shifting motivations in Chinese secondary school English teachers’ career narratives

Abstract

As English is now promoted as an academic subject in primary and secondary schools in China, creating an enormous demand for qualified English teachers, there is a need to understand English teachers’ motivation and commitment to the teaching career. In this paper, the author reports on a biographical study of 12 teachers who taught in schools in Chinese hinterland areas so as to understand why they first joined and then left the teaching profession for postgraduate studies. Through interpreting their professional experiences, the author came to understand their ambiguous attitudes towards the teaching profession and their fascination with the English language. Initially, many of them were unwilling to become teachers but were attracted by the teacher education programmes to learn more English. Many of them became more committed to teaching after they had positive professional experiences. However, their sense of satisfaction and achievement were undermined by the challenges that they had to cope with as well as an awareness that they were unable to sustain their professional competence. In order to retain such teachers in the profession, there is a need for teacher educators and educational administrators to work out strategies to support teachers’ demand for linguistic and professional improvement in remote rural areas on the Chinese mainland.

Keywords:

• motivation
• professional development
• biographical method
• Chinese cultural tradition
• contextual mediation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sue Brindley and the reviewers for constructive comments on an early draft of the manuscript. The study was generously supported by a Department Research Fund grant, Department of English, Hong Kong Institute of Education.

Notes

1. Secondary schools in China normally have two tracks. After completing three years’ junior middle school education, which is part of the nine‐year compulsory education, students can choose to study in academic senior high schools or vocational/specialist schools. Some of the vocational/specialist schools in economically developed areas were transformed into vocational colleges or polytechnics in recent years (see Gao, Su, and Hu 2006).